Category: Nonprofit

My grandma is 88-years old with reduced mobility. She lives alone, without a caretaker, in a small village. If she falls, then she is in danger. If something goes wrong when she’s in bed, she might need assistance. With an AWS IoT button, she can call for help in a simple way and potentially save her life. Her village provides free Wi-Fi coverage, so I built an emergency alert system using AWS. When she clicks the AWS IoT button, a series of events will take place to get her the assistance she needs. This can help her in difficult situations. It’s a solution that others can create as well. In this blog post, I’ll show you how to get started.

The United Nations, World Bank, and International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) with support from Amazon Web Services and other technology companies, recently launched the Famine Action Mechanism (FAM). The FAM is the first global mechanism dedicated to preventing future famines. In the past, responses to these devastating events have often come too late, once many lives have already been lost.

Today at re:Invent, the AWS Public Sector Breakfast focused on tech for good. Read below for the key takeaways.

The countdown is on until re:Invent 2018! This guide is designed to help public sector attendees plan their experience and identify breakout sessions and events of interest. It is intended to complement the re:Invent app, which will help attendees navigate the conference onsite.

Sharing data requires more than just making it available for download or creating an API to access it. In many ways, sharing data is similar to shipping a software product. Just like software; data is made up of digital information; it requires documentation; it will be used by groups of users who may require support; and it may become vital to those users’ work. Another common characteristic of software is that it often gets updated over time as software developers learn from their users and adapt to new technologies.

Public sector customers work on transformative and high-impact projects, but each organization is unique. Although their geography, mission, or size varies widely, their big thinking about how the cloud can improve or modernize services is a constant. From state and local GIS departments storing and analyzing spatial data in AWS to universities developing cloud capabilities to meet the needs of students on campus, our customers are realizing the benefits of the AWS Cloud. Learn from some of the cloud pioneers here.

The AWS Public Sector Summit in Ottawa saw snow, but the cloud prevailed. Government, education, and nonprofits joined us in the Canadian capital city to learn how early adopters are innovating with the cloud and the benefits seen coast to coast.

The new online Cloud Readiness Assessment tool is a self-guided checklist to gauge your level of preparedness for a smooth transition to the cloud. Driven by the need for greater productivity and lower costs, organizations around the world are moving their workloads to the cloud. Pre-migration planning can be as important as the implementation work itself. A cloud readiness assessment can transform an organization’s rough idea of moving to the cloud into a detailed plan that explains how to make it happen and in what order events should occur.

With October already in the rear-view mirror, take a look at the month’s highlights from the public sector blog.

Over the years, many organizations’ on-premises IT infrastructure has been compromised. Often times, organizations are left defending infrastructure, data, and people without understanding who is attacking them and why. But the sliver lining is that attackers often use the same tactics to try to initially compromise their targets. Knowing the ways that attackers try to get a foothold in your environment can help you defend it better.